That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [50]
Thirty years ago, noted Dempsey, the experiences a person had in the local high school, the experience in basic training, the experience in the army unit to which the new recruit was assigned, and the experience a soldier had on the battlefield “were not so different.” That made training easy, but it simply isn’t true anymore. Now, even traditional armies will confront America on the battlefield in a “hybrid” decentralized manner. So the army has to train its soldiers to reflect that prospect. It has to empower them to respond to the unpredictable experiences they will have in a village in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Fighting decentralized enemies, said Dempsey, is like “dropping a bowling ball into mercury.” So sometimes you need to inject chaos deliberately into the classroom. “When I say we want to inject chaos, foster creativity, and leverage technology to create a different learning model,” explained Dempsey, he means that drill instructors have to change, too. “What we have right now in many cases are instructors who want to be the sage on the stage: ‘I have the knowledge and you know nothing, so pay attention to my PowerPoint presentation and take notes. And then on the last day maybe we will get around to problem-solving exercises.’ The new model is for the classroom to provide a kind of warehouse of tools and applications that the students can download and deliver themselves.”
Army manuals are changing accordingly. “We have roughly four to five hundred doctrinal manuals that we are migrating to a Wiki format,” said Dempsey. “We have done about fifty already—how do you operate a forward base, a manual for bridge crossings, how to manage IEDs [improvised explosive devices], how to conduct a key-leader engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan, how to make best use of an unmanned aerial system. Let’s say you had a manual on how to organize a forward operating base in Afghanistan. In the past, the community responsible for doctrine would publish it. That would take three or four years to do, with a steering committee or review boards, and then it would take five to seven years to permeate the army schoolhouse. Now we are putting that all up in a Wiki that allows the community of practice to edit it constantly and contribute to it from their battlefield experiences. So it is always up-to-date, self-correcting, and adaptable in real time by the soldiers in the field. It is a living doctrinal textbook, with officers assigned to watch over and manage each doctrinal Wiki site.” (Don’t worry, they are protected so al-Qaeda cannot read them as well!)
The new recruits coming into the military today, said Dempsey, have an almost insatiable appetite for information, access, and connectivity. “They want to be by themselves sitting in the middle of the football field but connected to the rest of the world,” Dempsey said, adding: “They come in much less physically fit than previous generations because of lack of exercise. They come in with a mixed bag of values.” That is, he explained, they come with a genuine sense of purpose and patriotism and general desire to belong to something, but it is often not much more developed than that. “So we have made major changes to the physical-fitness training and we have made major changes in how we inculcate values,” he said. “I am not suggesting they have bad values, but among all the values that define our profession, first and most important is trust. If we could only do one thing with new soldiers, it would be to instill in them trust for one another, for the chain of command, and for the nation.”
A decade ago, the army was still trying to instill knowledge through rote memorization, especially in basic training. “We still have that, but now we